Conspiracy theories are the hors d’oeuvres for small minds. You could ask Howard Dean, the Rev. Jesse Jackson or even Oliver Stone (if you knew his e-mail address). The usual cause of evil in the world, as Dean Rusk famously explained to John F. Kennedy, is that at any given time half the people in the world are awake.

Nevertheless, sometimes. …

Why, for example, are we seeing a spike in the number of new studies purporting to show that nobody much reads Internet Web logs — or “blogs” — except the people who write them? Why are dark and sinister forces trying to persuade us that “blogs” are merely the work of unemployed geeks in pajamas (or worse, geeks in their BVDs), sitting around the house with nothing better to do than let fly into the cosmos half-baked opinions on everything they don’t know anything about, which is a lot? Could this be the work of Karl Rove, who is trying to prevent the exposure of his nefarious deeds by public-spirited bloggers, who are (just ask any of them) the last barrier between us and ruin?

Blogdom is big. This frightens evil-doers. The Blogosphere is so big, in fact, that it has even been noticed by the editorial page of the New York Times. By the estimate of Technorati, a Web site that keeps up with such things, there are already 14.2 million blogs, and 900,000 postings are put up every day. All but 11 of them are dedicated to exposing Karl Rove. (The other 11 are dedicated to outing Robert Novak as the outer of Valerie Plame, who baked the infamous yellow cake and blamed the indigestion on her husband.) By other estimates every person in America will have his/her own blog by Halloween, and some of us will have two, having accepted the invitation to “take two, and butter ‘em while they’re hot.”

So you can see why Mr. Rove is desperate to drop the big one on blogdom. Some of us, in fact, expected this to happen on Aug. 6 — last Saturday — since that was the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima’s claim to fame. Not all coincidences are coincidental.

One of the most effective of the Rove exposure blogs is written by one Greg Gutfeld on huffingtonpost.com, which is Arianna Huffington’s summer-camp project this year. It’s Gutfeld scoops like this one that, abetted by the heat of August, are driving the White House nuts:

“Right from day one, Karl Rove cemented his link with the religious right, by being born on Dec. 25, 1950, a day many on the right refer to as ‘Christmas,’ a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ (an influential leader worshipped by the religious right). It was no surprise that Dec. 25, 1950 was ALSO the EXACT day Communist forces recrossed the 38th parallel into South Korea. Clearly, Rove was making an [early] impact.”

Mr. Gutfeld follows Karl Rove’s life closely, noting what less observant observers would dismiss as trivial coincidences. Wars happened. Rivers flooded. People died. Why? River Phoenix, the actor, died on Halloween. “Where did he die? You guessed it: Los Angeles. The VERY same Los Angeles that Rove had visited ON A NUMBER OF OCCASIONS.” And what wonderful advocates for gay “marriage” Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche would have been if Miss Heche had not gone straight: “Only one person on the planet could have orchestrated this sequence of events.”

Sometimes the man once described as George W.’s brain was “conspicuous by his deliberate inconspicuousness.” Proof: “In 1979, he did some work on George H.W. Bush’s 1980 vice presidential bid. During Rove’s involvement [in this campaign], there were EIGHT major plane crashes, including a Western Air Lines DC-10, which collided with a Dumpster truck, killing 72 people in Mexico City at Benito Juarez Airport. One can only wonder what Rove was having for lunch. A burrito? A sizzling plate of fajitas?” His fondness for Mexican food, after all, is well-known.

The evidence of the Rove finger in assorted frijoles becomes irrefutable. Soon after Mr. Rove joined George W.’s gubernatorial campaign in Texas in 1993, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall died. “Rove probably did a little Pirouette,” writes our blogging scoopmeister, “not unlike something Rudolf Nureyev might have done, if he also had not died that year. Rove had already been [at work for George W.] for a year, and already a black and a Russian had died. Rove’s favorite drink? You guessed it: a Black Russian.”

We could go on, and Mr. Gutman, in fact, does. But by now it’s clear that Democrats and their allies are desperate to destroy Karl Rove — and why Mr. Rove is desperate to stop them, even if he has to destroy the blogosphere to do it.